CLPE released its second Reflecting Realities report on 19 September 2019. The Reflecting Realities: Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children’s Literature 2018 shows that there has been an increased presence of BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) characters in children’s books published in 2018, compared to the previous year. This is the second year the survey has been conducted in the UK, with the aim of identifying and highlighting representation within picture books, fiction and non-fiction for ages 3 – 11.
In an extended cross-curricular project, Years 3 and 4 create a poem scroll based on a traditional Bengali form of poetic narrative. Through drama, discussion and close examination of the original poem, the children came to understand the horrors of the tsunami and wrote and illustrated their own narrative poem, which they made into a scroll.